Review: Sociology and Biology: Can’t We Just Be Friends?

Author(s): Patrick Heuveline

Review by: Patrick Heuveline
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, No. 6 (May 2004), pp. 1500-1506
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421567
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Sociology and Biology: Can’t We Just Be
Friends?1
Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution. By
Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000. 432p.⫹xiv.

Patrick Heuveline
University of Chicago

On the question “What I don’t know about my field but wish I did,”
Douglas Massey (2000) concludes: “I really wish I knew more about hu-
man beings as biological rather than social organisms” (2000, p. 701).
Whereas sociology’s distance from biology appears to be deeply rooted
in these disciplines’ scientific and political projects, this statement from
the then-president of the American Sociological Association is perhaps
evidence of an emerging interest in closing the gap. But with few if notable
exceptions, mainstream sociology has so far engaged biology in a con-
frontational manner, and we have been slower than other social sciences
(e.g., psychology, anthropology, or demography) to seek ways to integrate
biological models and reasoning into our understanding of social behavior.
The continuous refinement of the biological models of behavior—the in-
creasing attention paid to the role of the environment in gene expression,
for instance—has brought several key sociological and biological issues
closer. Yet, between groups that have hardly been engaging one another
for a long time, stereotyping easily endures. From a distance, the most
vociferous and extremist positions are more likely to be heard, little more
than the titles of best-sellers such as Richard Dawkins’s (1976) The Selfish
Gene are being remembered,2 and acknowledging biological influences is

1
For comments on an early draft, I want to thank Patrice Adret, Mathew Leibold,
and William Parish, none of whom bears any responsibility in the views I express
here. Direct comments to Patrick Heuveline, Department of Sociology, University
of Chicago, 1126 East Fifty-ninth Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. E-mail:
pheuveline@uchicago.edu
2
Within the covers, one might be surprised to find that Dawkins never argues that
the transmission of genes dominates behavioral evolution, for which he introduces
“memes,” described as units of information residing in the brain and transmitted from
one person to the next by behavioral means (further discussed below in the text).

䉷 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0002-9602/2004/10906-0006$10.00

1500 AJS Volume 109 Number 6 (May 2004): 1500–1506

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 Review Essay

confused with seeing genes as destiny and picturing people as ants or

apes.
But for the sociologists wishing to know more about biological organ-
isms, the task is rather daunting. Driven in part by levels of funding that
the social sciences cannot dream of, biological knowledge is expanding
and diversifying rapidly. Where to start? What to read? Or, as stated in
the title of Richard Udry’s (1995) article, “What biology do sociologists
need to know?” While Udry’s article is particularly stimulating, I am
uncomfortable with the definition of a core of biology basics that every
sociologist ought to know. I say this primarily because what might be
useful in one’s research is likely quite topic specific. To take only one
example, Udry’s own work has emphasized hormonal influences on dif-
ferences in human sexual behavior. Brain research does suggest that the
genes derived from the father are preferentially expressed in the brain
regions that affect feeding and sexual behaviors, behaviors hence under
strong hormonal influences. However, according to Avital and Jablonka
(p. 345), paternal genes appear much less active than genes derived from
the mother in the neocortex, especially in the frontal cortex areas re-
sponsible for high cognitive functions. The biological factors that affect
individual differences in sexual behavior may hence not explain as much
of the individual differences in, say, childbearing, which involves a more
complex choice process in societies where highly efficient contraceptive
technology is available.
Asking what sociologists ought to know about biology may not make
more sense than asking what they ought to know about history. Those
working at the interface of sociology and another discipline, be it biology
or any other, certainly need to know a lot more than could be summarized
in a few pages. But while I like to think that, as curious minds, most
sociologists want to read good research from biology or history once in a
while, I would argue that in their everyday work, many can do without.
There is indeed growing evidence that one type of sociological investi-
gation that ought to be concerned with biological factors is the study of
the determinants of individual to individual variations in behavior. Some-
times the reaction of some sociologists is one of vehement opposition to
biological explanations; while this response may betray a perceived threat,
it might also be related to the emphasis that our discipline, in its quest
for scientific respectability, has placed on building atomistic, causal, be-
havioral models. With the proliferation of social survey sampling, pre-
dicting a vector of individual outcomes Y from a matrix of individual
characteristics X with everything else in a noise vector has become the
methodological staple of many sociological investigations. It is not hard
to see that the omission of all biological parameters in many such models
is problematic. But just as readily found are rather large expanses of

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American Journal of Sociology

sociological investigations that do not have to be concerned with biological

factors. Just as one does not need molecular physics to predict, accurately
enough for most purposes, the trajectory of two homogenous spheres
colliding on a horizontal plane from their mass, speed, and initial trajec-
tory, examples of aggregate social behaviors abound that can be studied
without attending to the infra-individual level.3
As much as I enjoyed and learned from Animal Traditions: Behavioural
Inheritance in Evolution by Avital and Jablonka, I hesitate to qualify it
as a “must read” for all social scientists. Yet, for those who are curious
about some of the current debates on behavior in the biological sciences,
this is a good place to start. First, the authors discuss, from the standpoint
of understanding animal behavior, the usefulness and limits of the current
evolutionary paradigm and the modern synthesis of Darwinian theory of
evolution with Mendelian genetics, which is perhaps the single most in-
fluential paradigm of the natural sciences. Second, by emphasizing the
role of social learning in the evolution of animal behavior, the authors
illustrate current attempts to broaden the narrowly “genic” view of evo-
lution in ways that should make evolutionary biology more palatable to
social scientists. For social scientists, there is much to learn and little to
take offense from in this book. In what we might consider an entertaining
inversion of sociobiologists’ attempts to explain human behavior from
evolutionary thinking in natural history, the authors all but extend to
most mammals and birds the claim prevalent in sociology and cultural
anthropology that culture liberates from genetic determination.4
The authors’ argument begins with a thorough critique of the “currently
fashionable version of Darwinism” (p. 1), which these authors refer to as
“genic” Darwinism, and of the related attempts to explain all patterns of
animal behavior in terms of genetic programs. John Maynard Smith is
reputed to have declared, “No one is a genetic determinist anymore,” and
the authors might be taking on a straw man, but they provide a clear
summary of the limitations of genetic determinism, and they clearly have
a knack for metaphors. Perhaps reminiscent of sociobiologist Edward O.
Wilson’s statement that genes held culture on a leash, the authors describe
the relationship of the phenotype to the genotype as that of the kite to
its string (chap. 2). When the string is relatively short, the kite is easily
controlled by specific controls being applied to the string. Likewise, fairly

3
Udry recognizes this too but in a single, rather short paragraph on social change. We
might hence differ only as to whether to describe the bio-free sociology glass as half-
full or half-empty!
4
Avital and Jablonka maintain that the term culture is applicable “to a set of socially
transmitted habits in higher animals,” even though those habits do not involve the
ability to communicate symbolically nor linguistically (p. 21).

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 Review Essay

simple genotypes, such as eye color, are strongly influenced by specific

genes. For more complex maneuvers, however, one must release more
string, and the longer the string, the more the kite’s movements are in-
fluenced by the wind and other environmental factors. When the string
is very long, the kite can hardly be controlled by the string; if anything,
the movements of the kite determine the movement of the string. Even-
tually, the authors must abandon the kite metaphor to add that behavior
is not entirely passive to the environment—the two interact instead—but
the metaphor serves them well to illustrate how complex behaviors are
only remotely affected by genes. The authors conclude that hence pop-
ulation genetics alone cannot explain behavioral change—a statement
perhaps less polemical than they make it sound—and that we must look
for mechanisms other than genetic inheritance to explain the transmission
of complex behaviors across generations.
Straightforward imports from genetics, such as Dawkins’s theory of
“memes” or cultural units transmission, do not readily apply to animal
behavior, as the authors point out. Behavior forms a whole from which
units, equivalent to genes, can hardly be isolated. One does not transmit
behavior passively, as is the case for genes; on the contrary, the trans-
mission of behavior occurs within behavior itself, and it is impossible to
separate the transmission itself from what is transmitted. The authors’
views are thus closer to the anthropologist William Durham’s claims about
the coevolution of genes and culture. While natural selection operates on
individual variations, those variations are not entirely random mistakes
but instead occur in the process of learning a given behavior. The authors
thus contend that behavioral change guides genetic evolution at least as
much the other way around. One objection that biologists have formulated
before to that proposition is that a behavioral change would then have
to remain stable for a very long time, over many generations, before it
begins to affect genetic diversity.
Avital and Jablonka find support for the coevolution thesis in the grow-
ing research on social learning (chap. 3). By adding the ability to learn
the behavioral traditions of an animal group, they identify a mechanism
that maintains behavior relatively constant across generations and makes
it relatively “plastic” or independent of the changing genetic composition
of the group. Learning is here defined as “an adaptive change in behaviour
that results from experience” (p. 69). The authors contrast several complex
behaviors. Some involve innate components, with no or little learning.
Others involve asocial learning—for instance when immunity to food
poisoning allows an individual to learn alone of benign consequences
through trials and errors. Among birds and mammals, however, the au-
thors claim that a very large component is learned through social learning
with older individuals, usually the parents. Unlike imitation, socially in-

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American Journal of Sociology

fluenced learning teaches the learner about the environmental circum-

stances that elicit a behavior without the behavior being necessarily dis-
played by another individual. The authors suggest, for instance, that the
mere presence of a parent preventing the most costly mistakes to be made
provides a sense of security, reduces the level of stress in the offspring,
and eventually facilitates learning. Among the key aspects of the devel-
opment of young birds and mammals that are learned with the parents,
“knowing what to eat, where to find its food and how to harvest it” (p.
119) is arguably the single most important. Social scientists may find even
more interesting the material on “sexual imprinting,” which refers to be-
havioral markers of the original background that play a role in mate
choice, such as song patterns in birds. By increasing phenotypic similarity,
sexual imprinting contributes to pairing mates that are well suited to share
the same environment, but were it too rigid and precise, sexual imprinting
could lead to excessive inbreeding. Quails, for instance, appear to seek
mates who are similar but not identical to their siblings. Thus one may
find in animals mating schemes relatively similar to the marriage rules
uncovered by kinship anthropologists.
By reexamining family behavior through the lens of the importance of
social learning and the transmission of information, the authors challenge
conventional interpretations in terms of the evolutionary conflict between
mates or between parents and offspring. While conflict arguments focus
on the different fitness of the genes of males and females, or parents and
offspring, Avital and Jablonka counter that behavior involves information
that is shared or gained together and that thus involves cooperation rather
than conflict. Again, the authors are best at describing the complexity and
diversity of animal behavior and criticizing simplistic explanations for all
animal behaviors (that some may want to extend to human behavior).
For instance, explaining differences in male and female sexual behaviors
by their conflicting evolutionary strategies (males seeking a higher number
of mates and females seeking fewer “high-quality” mates) only makes sense
in species in which the male contributes little more than his genes and
the female alone cares for offspring. Things are clearly more complex
when the male does not merely inseminate the female but also invests in
parental care, as is the case in most monogamous species. While the
authors’ reinterpretation of behaviors as enhancing the transfer of infor-
mation rather than resulting from conflict appears most often quite plau-
sible, the lack of evidence to test the alternative interpretations remain
frustrating. While possibly remaining agnostic about the validity of some
claims, the reader will still be rewarded with a refreshing picture of the
variety of animal behavior and of the increased sophistication of evolu-
tionary thinking. One, for instance, will find echoes of the economic theory
of marriage in the argument that much of the information shared by the

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 Review Essay

mates would be of little interest with other mates. This information rep-
resents a pair-specific investment, which provides benefits only in the
existing union, and individual-specific rather than universal preferences
for partners further increase the costs of desertion. Sociologists might find
an evolutionary self-fulfilling prophecy in the idea that traits considered
“attractive” when choosing a mate might increase fitness merely because
potential mates believe they do. The dominant explanation for “attractive”
traits is that they are “honest signals” of a potential mate’s high fitness,
and they become factors of selection jointly with the ability to recognize
them as attractive. (Color and length in the peacock’s tail, which so
intrigued Darwin because they did not contribute to survival, were indeed
found to be correlated with the individual’s health.) But a hereditary trait
found attractive would still be fitness enhancing were it a completely
neutral signal of the mate’s quality, just because its transmission to off-
spring would in turn allow them to mate and reproduce more easily. The
authors gradually move outward from the mates and offsprings nucleus
to the larger group, considering allo-parenting and other apparently al-
truistic group behavior and extending their argument that selection op-
erates not only at the level of the individual but also at the level of the
group. The selection of behavior that increases the reproductive success
of kin is now widely recognized and understood by considering inclusive
fitness, that is, the fitness of the individual but also of other genetically
related individuals, weighted by their degree of relatedness. In a more
radical departure from extant evolutionary thinking, the authors describe
altruistic behavior that benefits the group of mostly unrelated individuals
as also fitness enhancing. They argue, for instance, that altruistic behavior
may provide benefits to all group members and that these benefits out-
weigh the potential costs to the altruistic individuals, allowing groups
with more altruists to reproduce more prolifically. Since population ge-
netics firmly rules out genetic selection at the group level, the stability
across generations of such altruistic behavior within the group would
require in particular that the behavior be independent of the changing
genetic composition of the population. While this idea is not implausible,
the authors provide precious few examples of such transmission mecha-
nisms across generations, in part because of their insistence on playing
down evolutionary conflict. One of the few instances they describe is the
“phenotypic cloning” of an adult behavior by an unrelated young animal
(p. 238), but they insist it is beneficial to the “allo-parent,” because the
behavior promotes in several ways the allo-parent’s own reproductive
success. This might be the case, but instances where lower-ranked indi-
viduals are coerced by higher-ranked ones into behaving in ways that are
beneficial to the group are more commonly against the reproductive in-
terests of the recipient. For instance, the reproductive suppression of some

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American Journal of Sociology

individuals (via harassment by others that prevent mating or via infan-

ticide) may provide benefits to the group when group growth would pres-
sure survival, yet such actions can hardly be seen as enhancing the fitness
of these dominated individuals. While an animal group can function ef-
ficiently only when competition for food, mates, and space is regulated,
arguing that this evolutionary stable regulation has to be fitness enhancing
for all members of the group might remind sociologists of the early func-
tionalist explanations that suppressed all mentions of power differences.
Dominated individuals may engage in cooperative behavior in the context
of a competition that they cannot hope to win, rather than freely following
a genuine, evolved altruistic behavior.
To complete their argument of a coevolution of genes and social learn-
ing, the authors suggest that the ability to learn is itself a product of
evolution. In a stable environment, evolution would favor the inheritance
of innate behavior across generations by genetic assimilation, whereas in
more fluctuating environmental conditions, the transmission of socially
learned behavior would be more beneficial. In this perspective, genetic
assimilation would have freed some more mundane behavior from learn-
ing, allowing individuals to learn more complex tasks gradually. This
evolved ability to learn across generations increasingly complex sequences
gave some animals a behavioral plasticity that made many phenotypes
all but independent from genotypes, while “genetic evolution became ever
more dependent on culture, following, rather that leading, as it was chan-
neled into the grooves drilled by cultural evolution” (p. 367).
In sum, Animal Traditions is a very well written text, full of wonderful
vignettes on animal behaviors and stimulating hypotheses about their
evolution. Biologists are not likely to embrace all of these hypotheses
readily. As Avital and Jablonka are well aware, however sophisticated
their account might be, some critical elements still sound too close from
the dismissed Lamarckian paradigm of the inheritance of acquired char-
acteristics. The lack of tests for competing hypotheses might not allow
nonspecialists to make definitive, informed judgments about these de-
bates, but readers will be rewarded with a more sophisticated overview
of this field than they might have imagined from the often simplistic
import of evolutionary thinking in other fields.

REFERENCES
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Massey, Douglas S. 2000. “What I Don’t Know about My Field but Wish I Did.”
Annual Review of Sociology 26:699–701.
Udry, Richard J. 1995. “Sociology and Biology: What Biology Do Sociologists Need
to Know?” Social Forces 73 (4): 1267–78.

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